Blogging has entered the mainstream

(Vous trouverez une traduction en français de cet article dans le billet suivant.)

• Blogging is changing, observes The Economist. It has has entered the mainstream.

Top Blogs are now written by professionals (Technorati Top 100). Andinternet users prefer Facebook, MySpace or other social networks.

Famous bloggers (Jason Calacanis or Versac in France) recently announced their "retirement from blogging". “Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it,” said Calacanis when he stopped blog.

Nearly every newspaper, radio and television channel now runs blogs and updates them faster than any individual blogger ever could.

To the earliest practitioners, over a decade ago, blogging was the regular posting of text updates, and later photos and videos, about themselves and their thoughts to a few friends and family members. Today lots of internet users do this, only they may not think of it as blogging. Instead, they update their profile pages on Facebook, MySpace or other social networks.

• Nichoplas Carr noticed: "Little distinguishes today's popular blogs from ordinary news sites." "Blog front pages are now large pages of images and scripts rather than the pared-down text pages of old," he writes."

Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they're part of a "blogosphere" that is distinguishable from the "mainstream media" seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

Eco89